Working online, living offline: labour in the Internet Age
It is often argued that ‘digital labour’ or ‘virtual work’ is fundamentally different from traditional forms of labour carried out offline, with ‘work’ and ‘play’ collapsed together to become ‘playbour’ and new forms of value creation that do not fit traditional economic models. But however ‘immaterial’ their labour processes, workers still have bodies that become exhausted and require feeding and housing in the ‘real’ economy. Drawing on both theoretical and empirical research, this collection takes a critical look at how online work can be theorised and categorised (including revisiting concepts of ‘deskilling’ developed in the 1970s). It also analyses how the development of online work has meshed with broader trends in organisational restructuring to erode traditional employment norms, time structures and models of behaviour at work, placing new stresses on offline daily life.
Contents
‘Working online, living offline: labour in the Internet Age’ by Ursula Huws
‘Web, value and labour’, by Sabine Pfeiffer
‘Towards a taxonomy of virtual work’, by Kaire Holts
‘Distance learning and the transformation of working conditions in teaching: ICTs and the commodification of education in Brazil’, by Simone Wolff and Sergio Antunes de Almeida
‘Forced to go virtual?: Distributed cooperation of small software firms’, by Annika Schönauer, Ruth Kasper, Jörg Flecker and Ursula Holtgrewe
‘IT firms’ working time (de)regulation model: a by-product of risk management strategy and project-based work management’, by Marie-Josée Legault
‘”A science to it”: flexible time and flexible subjectivity in the digital workplace’, by Frederick Pitts
‘Labour relations and globalisation: an analysis of ethical dilemmas from “Le Couperet”’, by Fábio Francisco de Araujo and Patrícia Amélia Tomei
‘Automating amateurs in the 3D printing community: connecting the dots between “deskilling” and “user-friendliness”’, by Johan Söderberg
‘Review: Digital Connect’, by Eran Fisher
‘Review: recent publications on the commodification of public services’, by Bryan Evans
Work organisation, labour & globalisation 